By Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Victor Longa, Guillermo Lorenzo, Juan Uriagereka
Two Neanderthals from El Sidrón (Asturias, Spain; Rosas et al. 2006) have been recently analyzed by Krause et al.(henceforth K) for possible mutations in FOXP2 (Krause et al. 2007), a gene involved in the faculty of language (Lai et al. 2001). Although these mutations were believed to be specific to modern humans (Enard et al. 2002), this investigation revealed otherwise. Other details of the genomic analysis of these specimens led K to the conclusion that “these two amino acid substitutions […] associated with the emergence of fully modern language ability”(Krause et al. 2007: 1908) were probably inherited both by Neanderthals and modern Sapiens from their last common ancestor (300,000 to 400,000 years BP).